(26-03-2020, 04:12 PM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.These are great news! Many thanks to Lisa, Koen and David!
In addition to what JKP wrote, I would be curious to know Lisa's views about the several, but short, Voynch marginalia.
Some of them (f17r, f66r, f116v) appear together with Voynichese words. Could they date to the same time-frame as the main text? Is there any hope of extracting some additional information from them? (e.g. about where/when they might have been written, or who might have used a similar script)
I would also love to know what she thinks of the other sets of marginalia, e.g. month names and quire numbers.
And what about the single characters / short words that could be colour annotations (e.g. f1v, 7fr)? What do they tell us?
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I should probably disclose this as a matter of professional courtesy.
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I haven't written it up yet because I am still analysing the data (I hope to do so soon), but I have been looking into these questions for 12 years and have collected and categorized a very large amount of palaeographic data specifically selected for similarity to the marginalia on 116v, the quire numbers, and the folio numbers.
I currently have the following, selected from searching more than 12,000 manuscripts:
- 1,000 samples of scripts with some similarity to 116v, of which 130 score reasonably high.
- 108 samples that bear some similarity to the alphabets in the right-hand column of f1r, of which about 10 have a reasonably high similarity.
- A few sample scripts that are similar to the de Tepenecz name on f1r.
- A handful of scripts that are similar to the color annotations (very difficult to research as they may not all be the same hand and there are very few).
- 488 samples that bear some similarity to the quire numbers, of which 228 are reasonably similar and 38 are quite similar.
- A handful of samples similar to the month-name labels added to the zodiac-figures section (difficult to research because the text is sparse).
- 455 samples that bear some similarity to the folio numbers, of which 189 are reasonably similar and 67 are quite similar.
I will document the samples and geographically map their origins and timeframes.
I have NOT had time to study the various hands in the main text. I was happy to see LFD was doing it (I think this data may turn out to be more valuable than people might initially appreciate) and I am, of course, interested in her opinions on marginalia in the VMS. I have mainly focused my research on the various added notes.
I began looking into this because palaeographer John Watson had said, with a high degree of certainty, that the foliation was in the hand of John Dee and I wondered whether it was possible to confirm or deny this as part of the VMS provenance. What I discovered was that Dee's hand
is very similar but I have a handful of samples in other hands that are arguably as close or slightly closer, so I think it is still an open question. I posted some of the preliminary research on Dee's handwriting on my blog, but I have much more information now and will write it up as soon as I have time.
My background is not specifically in palaeography (although I do try to read the texts as much as possible). I am a software developer and media specialist, but I am also a professional calligrapher and digital font designer (I've developed fonts for some of the biggest companies in the world), which is one of the reasons I have a strong interest in the text.